BUSHIRE — BUSK axle is of mild steel or -wrought iron. White metal or Babbitt’s metal (an alloy of tin, copper, and antimony, with a large percentage of tin) is used for hushing ; it has a low melting-point, and may he cast about the shaft of which it is to form a bearing. Bush ire, or Bander Bushire, a town of Persia, on the coast of Pars, situated in 28° 59' 1ST. lat. and 50° 49' E. long. The name should be pronounced Boosheer and not Bew-shire; modern Persians write it Bushehr, and, yet more incorrectly, Abiishehr, and translate it as “ father of the city,” but it is most probably a contraction of Bokhtardashlr, the name given to the place by the first Sassanian monarch in the 3rd century (vide N’oeldeke’s translation of Ardashir Papakan’s Karnamek). In a similar way Blvardashir has become Kishire (Beesheer). In the first half of the 18th century, when Bushire was an unimportant fishing village, it was selected by Nadir Shah as the southern port and dockyard of the navy which he aspired to create in the Persian Gulf, and soon afterwards the British commercial factory of the East India Company, established at Gombnin, the modern Bander Abbasi, was transferred to it. At the beginning of the 19th century it had a population of 6000 to 8000, and it is now the most important port in the Persian Gulf, with a population of about 25,000. It used to be a port of Ears, but it is now the seat of the governor of the Persian Gulf ports, who is responsible to the central Government, and has under his jurisdiction all the ports of the Gulf and the districts along the coast. The following table shows the value of the exports and imports from and to Bushire in thousands of pounds, and the shipping entered and cleared at the port in thousands of tons, as given in British consular reports :— Exports. Imports. Total Tonnage. British Tonnage. Year. Total. British. Total. British. Entered. Cleared Entered. Cleared 111 102 100 1885 586 204 791 728 113 114 109 108 1890 720 298 1268 1183 114 182 173 164 1895 529 226 1017 928 189 144 135 126 1896 440 183 788 624 166 982 114 113 100 98 1897 393 173 1145 632 112 99 843 1898 427 188 97 85 131 124 108 1899 529 174 917 667 149 Bushmen, or Bosjesmans.—Some of the statements made in the earlier article on these aborigines of South Africa (Ency. Brit. vol. iv. pp. 575-6) require to be supplemented in the light of recent research. Ethnologists no longer speak of any resemblance to the Mongolians, except perhaps in the prominence of the cheek-bones, and the yellowish or yellowish-brown colour of the skin. In all other respects the difference between the two races is fundamental, while the complexity of the physical and mental characters seems rather to point to an original connexion between the under-sized Bushmen and the distinctly dwarfish Negritoes scattered in small groups over the forest tracts of the Congo and Ogowe basins. Dr Ludwig Wolf (Im innern Afrikas, pp. 258-61), one of the latest and most careful observers, has little doubt that both groups are surviving fragments of a primeval pigmy Negroid stock, which is to be regarded as the true autochthonous element in equatorial and South Africa. Whatever differences are now observable may readily be explained by the different environments—hot, moist woodlands in the north; hot, dry steppe lands in the south. This generalization is supported by the now established former widespread diffusion of the Bushman race, which has been traced as far north as the Nyasa and Tanganyika basins, where the Bushman and Negrito domains must have been contiguous in prehistoric times. “ It would seem,” writes Sir H. H. Johnston (British Central Africa, p. 52), “as if the earliest known race of man inhabiting what is now British Central Africa was akin to the Bushman-Hottentot type of negro.
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Rounded stones with a hole through the centre, similar to those which are used by the Bushmen in the south for weighting their digging-sticks (the graaf stock of the Boers), have been found at the south end of Lake Tanganyika.” Nor is any difficulty presented by the character of the tufted woolly hair of the Bushmen, which has no intermediate bald spaces, as was formerly supposed, but is evenly distributed over the scalp, like that of the Negritoes, and is also invariably of the same intensely black colour. The assumed “ peppercorn ” type of hair growing in isolated tufts is based on a misconception ; and although it has been made a racial character by Fr. Muller and some other distinguished anthropologists, more careful observation has shown that it is not found amongst any known races. A transition between the Bushmen and the Congo Negritoes seems to be presented by the hitherto little known Vaalpens, who still survive in small groups about the middle Limpopo river, the Zoutpansberg, and perhaps some other districts of North Transvaal. More degraded even than the lowest of the Bushmen, the Vaalpens are so called by the Boers from the dusty look of their bodies, due to their habit of crawling like burrowing animals into their underground dwellings. But the true colour is a pitch black, apparently of a deeper shade than that of the Wolofs or any other negro race. In height the men average about 4 feet, i. e., somewhat less than the shortest Bushmen, and a little more than the shortest Negritoes described by Wolf and Emin Pasha. Socially the Vaalpens, who are the “dogs,” or “carrion-birds,” of the surrounding Bantu peoples, occupy a lower position perhaps even than the Fuegians, or the extinct Tasmanians. A feeble, harmless folk, they are described as the very dregs of humanity, living in holes, caves, or rock-shelters, without clothes except the kaross, or implements of any kind beyond those procured from others in exchange for skins, ivory, or ostrich feathers. In return for menial services rendered to the Boers, they are thankful for the offal of the game or other animals they may have helped to skin. They form small family groups of thirty or forty under a chief or patriarch, whose functions are purely domestic, as must be the case where there are no arts, industries, or religion of any kind, nothing but a knowledge of fire with which to cook their meals, often consisting of the aged or infirm members of the family circle. Intercourse with the surrounding populations is carried on by signs, nobody having any knowledge of their speech, which would appear to be scarcely articulate, or at least so full of clicks as to be incapable of expression by any clear phonetic system. Hence it is impossible to say whether the Vaalpens possess any folklore or other oral literature analogous to that of their more advanced Bushman neighbours. Some idea of the astonishing wealth of this Bushman literature may be formed from the fact that the materials collected by Bleek, and now preserved in Sir George Grey’s library at Cape Town, form eighty-four stout MS. volumes of 3600 pages. They comprise myths, fables, legends, and even poetry, with tales about the sun and moon, the stars, the crocodile, and other animals; legends of peoples who dwelt in the land before the Bushmen arrived from the north ; songs, charms, and even prayers, or at least incantations ; histories, adventures of men and animals; tribal customs, traditions, superstitions, and genealogies. It is largely owing to this copious folklore literature, taken in connexion with their astonishing power of pictorial delineation, that the Bushmen are often regarded as a race which, owing to adverse circumstances, has fallen from a higher cultural plane, whereas the Vaalpens represent, on the contrary, a state of arrested development analogous to that of the Samangs and other Negritoes of the Malay Peninsula. See Mark Hutchinson. “ Bushman Drawings,” in Jour. Anthrop. Instit. 1882, p. 464.—Rev. J. Mackenzie. Blue Book, 1885, p. 63.—Sir H. H. Johnston. Jour. Anthrop. Inst. 1883, p. 463. •—Dr H. Welcker. Archiv. f. Anthrop. xvi.—G. Bertin. “The Bushmen and their Language,” Jour. R. Asiat. Soc. xviii. Part I.—Gustav Fritsch. Die Eingeborenen Sild - afrikas. Breslau, 1872.—W. H. J. Bleek. Bushman Folklore, 1875.— J. L. P. Erasmus. The Wild Bushman, MS. note, 1899. (a. h. k.) Busk, George (1808-1886), British surgeon and biologist, was born at St Petersburg in 1808. He studied surgery in London, both at St Thomas’s and St Bartholomew’s hospitals, and was an excellent operator. He was appointed assistant - surgeon to the Greenwich Hospital in 1832, and served as naval surgeon first in the Grampus, and afterwards for many years in the Dread-
